Nick Cave on the encounters that brought him to 'Wild God'

All Songs Considered

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Music

4.4 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2024

⏱️ 62 minutes

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Summary

On August 30, the Australian-born rock titan Nick Cave will release Wild God, a new album with his band The Bad Seeds. It's a high point in Cave's career, and NPR Music's Ann Powers spoke with him about the struggles — personal, musical and religious — he faced on the road to making the album.

Wild God is filled with songs about encounters with the divine, which does not always take a benevolent form. And it follows a decade in which Cave, having publicly faced tragedy in his own life, has evolved from post-punk's louchest fallen angel into a revered figure among his audience in a new way: a dignified seeker whose courage and wisdom resounds beyond musical boundaries thanks to advice he has shared in interviews, writing projects and public appearances. Perhaps it's not surprising that so many of the songs reckon with the moment of revelation or transformation, or the demand for conversion from a

As for the state of his own religious conviction, Cave says that the struggle is the point: "I would say I'm in the process of conversion," he tells Powers. Wherever he is on that road, he's found something ecstatic to share.

Click here to read a transcript of this interview and hear songs from the album Wild God.

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0:15.0	So Anne, I've been thinking a lot lately about how
0:21.0	there aren't many artists or musicians where I can say,
0:24.8	I remember the first time I ever saw or heard them
0:27.5	because, you know, just of the incredible lasting impression
0:31.0	they made on me.
0:31.6	Yeah, very few.
0:32.8	But one I can certainly remember, vividly remember,
0:36.6	is Nick Cave.
0:38.3	Yes.
0:39.0	I mean, I remember precisely when I first heard him
0:42.2	and saw him with the band The Bad Seeds.
0:44.1	It was in the late 1980s and he was in this what I think is a legendary movie that came out
0:50.8	around that time called Wings of Desire.
0:53.0	One of my favorites.
0:54.0	Right.
0:55.0	But for those who don't know it, and you really should watch it if you haven't seen it.
0:59.0	It is a very beautiful artful film about, well, I mean mean it's about lots of things, but at least on the
1:06.2	surface it's about these guardian angels who watch over us, you know and there's this one
	...

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